The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  In the last scene of this triumphantly viral production, the dying Cyrano asked that his chair be placed against ‘this tree’. This tree was a tower of metal tubes. But by then we were used to the anomaly. Towers of metal tubes had been pretending to be trees all night. The tops of the towers had been pretending to be balconies. High on her tubular balcony, Roxane, persuaded by Cyrano’s ventriloqual ardour, gave Christian her permission to climb the jasmine tree. The climb up the jasmine tree took him long enough for me to concoct a brace of appropriate couplets to which he is welcome, if the production can do a deal with my agent.

  Bless me, Roxane, and let your heart take wing

  To lift me as I climb this scaffolding:

  Send down a kiss from your lips red and ripe

  As my hands, bloody from these lengths of pipe.

  As played by Claire Price, Roxane was worth climbing the Chrysler Building to reach. If she looked a bit less like Kate Winslet, Miss Price would probably be a film star by now. As things are, she is well on the way to being a first-choice theatrical leading lady for any company still harbouring the politically unreconstructed belief that a female object of love should actually be beautiful. Her performance in the National’s The Relapse established her as a house favourite, and during her excursion to Sheffield it was noticed that Kenneth Branagh’s Richard III – another and more swinish swain with a deformity problem – had believable reasons for throwing himself upon Lady Anne. She managed to look equally fetching in Cyrano de Bergerac, even if the Olivier’s lack of footlights – another viral breakthrough – ensured that the full glory of her face was only intermittently visible. But she had very little that was fetching to say. When Christian made the mistake of trying to woo her in his own words instead of Cyrano’s, she reproved him thus.

  You’d better smarten up and quickly, brother:

  go home and get your stupid head together

  or we can drop the idea of real relations.

  As dialogue, this was worse than updated, it was dysfunctional. Updatings disfigured almost every page of the text, but most of them were merely dreary. The phrase ‘chatting up the chicks’ rang out. ‘Space cadets’ were referred to. ‘Stereo’ was rhymed with ‘brio’, even though the two words do not rhyme anyway. Most of this could be ignored, and Mr Rea even had the sense to ignore one of his own lines. To chime with Cyrano’s interest in outer space, he had been given an echo of Captain Kirk: ‘to boldly go . . .’ In the printed text Cyrano continues the line, but on stage the three dots were as far as Mr Rea took it, having sensibly decided that he had enough to deal with. Contemporary references, as a means of jazzing a period text, made their first appearance in the opera house, where it has long been supposed that the libretto of a piece by Offenbach or Lehar can be brought back from the dead if given a sprinkling of commentary based on current affairs. Since audiences for music will laugh at anything labelled as a joke, the case seemed proved, and the virus ensured that the same assumption was transferred to the spoken theatre, where we are now regularly assailed with crassly updated scripts whose directors, unburdened with any sense of humour of their own, are under the illusion that they can call in any catchpenny comic writer and get results that would have amazed Nestroy. They are right about that, but not in the way they think. Derek Mahon is not among the gag-writing journeymen. He knows even less than they do about comedy, as his jokes prove, but he knows much more about the texture of language. He should have known enough not to make Roxane sexually aware. ‘Real relations’ means sex, and Roxane is supposed to be thinking about love.

  In the long run there might not be a lot of difference, but Rostand was writing about the short run, in which Roxane wants to be loved before she is touched, and Cyrano wants her to love him, even though unromanticized sex is something he knows all about. The original Cyrano certainly did: syphilis was probably what he died of. Rostand himself was one of the great boudoir operators of his time: among the actresses he conquered was Sarah Bernhardt, and among the illustrious women of the beau monde was the legendary Anna de Noailles. There is thus some warrant for supposing that the thing sticking out of Cyrano’s face might be a phallic symbol, and one of Derek Mahon’s inspired updates – Cyrano’s claim that his nose is a popular addition to his powers of cunnilingus – might not be without merit, although the way of putting it was sadly without grace. If Cyrano had rolled a condom onto his nose as a gesture towards safe sex, it would have been no more anachronistic than a jasmine tree assembled with a spanner, and might even have made a point; but only if modern points are the kind you want to make; and there is not much point in making those if they ruin the ones that are already there, and are essential to the plot.

  One of the essential plot points is that Roxane, a woman young enough to be still thinking the way men think always, attributes all the virtues to Christian just because he is beautiful, even though he is as dumb as they come. Some of the most beautiful actors in the world are of exotic origin, but Zubin Varla is not among them. He is more beautiful than I am, but at the rate his temples are retreating he will soon have my hairstyle, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that a knockout like Roxane would not fall for him at first meeting unless he spoke like Cyrano, whereas the whole point is that she falls for him before he starts speaking like Cyrano. I am sorry to labour the obvious, but the virus has driven me to it. One thing you should be able to count on with any theatre company, no matter how dedicated it might be to social engineering, is that if it wants to cast the role of a handsome, not very bright young man, there are plenty of candidates available. Worse than not looking especially gorgeous, Mr Varla looked as smart as a whip. Miscasting is never an actor’s fault, so we should confine ourselves to observing that here was a Christian with all the disqualifications, plus one more that Rostand would never have dreamed possible.

  Christian turned out to be deaf. In the published text, wooing Roxane from below her scaffolding, he is merely hesitant when the hidden Cyrano prompts him. But during rehearsals somebody had a better idea, and so we were forced to listen when Christian turned Cyrano’s every suggested line into a string of off-colour puns. The audience did not laugh much, but kindly decided not to lynch him. Remarkably, Roxane decided not to either, and carried on listening as per the unjollified text, instead of parachuting off the back of the scaffolding and booking into the convent early. Luckily that was the low point for Christian. Later on, at the Thirty Years War, he got the chance to die an heroic death in defence of the scaffolding, which the enemy was attacking with machine guns. Those of us who had been hoping that it would be attacked with a Tomahawk cruise missile might have been disappointed, but for Christian, weak with hunger, it was time to climb the pipes, as men weak with hunger so often do. Thus elevated, he was shot in the chest and dived to an early death. The less fortunate Cyrano was obliged to keep breathing until his belated demise among the falling leaves. Luckily these were not represented by falling clamps and bolts. They were just words. In theory, words were all he had ever needed. Unfortunately he was never given the right ones.

  Lying there in the arms of Claire Price – not normally the worst fate a man can imagine – Mr Rea must have felt his false nose weighing like a lead balloon. He is all too aware that in the 1983 Anthony Burgess version Derek Jacobi finished the evening with the audience pulling the walls in: men signed up for fencing class while women sobbed into each other’s handkerchiefs. As Antony Sher reveals in his memoir Beside Myself, Jacobi’s performance convinced him that he had no chance to play it handsome plus false nose, but should follow the lead set by his own looks, which he had never liked. He would observe the difference Burgess had drawn between ‘the visible soul’ and ‘the casual dress of flesh’. The Burgess version had enough zing to set the actors and the audience on fire. Burgess kept the exactness of the couplets even when he opened the rhyme scheme into quatrains. Before him, Christopher Fry had deftly done the whole thing in couplets. But for some reason we still think that strict rhymes mea
n restriction, and that to throw them away means freedom. Why?

  Because it is true. In the English theatre, the norm of fluent speech was set by Shakespeare, who had all the technical skill to turn Chaucer’s narrative couplets into a viable dramatic form, but chose to do otherwise. He went for blank verse instead, thus establishing an expectation beside which a latticework of spoken rhymes will always sound artificial. Not even Dryden was powerful enough to put the expectation into reverse. For the French, the normal expectation has always been rhyming couplets. Corneille, Racine and Molière set a rhythm which rebellion could never break, but only work within. The first riot on the opening night of Victor Hugo’s Hernani took place when he broke the rule of always putting the adjective and noun inside the same hemistitch. The audience knew exactly what he was up to because they had been hearing classical couplets all their lives. Rostand could count on that universal expectation when he gave Cyrano the energy of a wild animal. The wild animal is in a cage, and what a French audience hears is its repeated assault on the bars. (You could even call them scaffolding if you like, but in French you would have to say échafaudage.) For Cyrano, however, his confinement does not mean prison. Without the fierce requirements of rhyme, his wit would never have been driven to its dizzy height, just as, without the burden of his nose, he would never have been compelled to the nobility of his sacrifice. The great truth at the heart of the play emerges even from this production: if we love someone we can’t have, but love them so much that we want them to be happy with someone else, it might not be as good as we’ll ever feel, but it’s probably as good as we’ll ever be.

  TLS, 30 April 2004

  A NIGHTCLUB IN BALI

  The shock wave from the car-bomb outside the nightclub on Kuta Beach in Bali went all the way to Australia in a matter of minutes. As soon as the young Australian survivors stopped trembling long enough to touch one button at a time, they were calling home to say they were all right. But there were some young Australians who did not call home, because they were not all right. The Australian casualty list is lengthening even as I compose this opening paragraph, and by the time I reach a conclusion the casualty list will be longer still. I owe it to my dead, wounded and bereaved countrymen to say straight away that I have no clear idea of what that conclusion will be. This is no time to preach, and least of all from a prepared text.

  Some of Australia’s commentators on politics might already be realizing that. Now they, too, must feel their way forward: the bomb has done to their certainties what it did to the revellers in the nightclub. Before the bomb went off, the pundits had all the answers about the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. In the year and a bit between September 11th 2001 and October 12th 2002 they had, from the professional viewpoint, a relatively easy time. One didn’t question their capacity for sympathy: Australian journalists pride themselves on being a hard-bitten crew, but most of them could imagine that being trapped hundreds of feet up in a burning building was no fit way to die. What one did sometimes question was their capacity for analysis. A prepared text was rolled out, and went on unrolling.

  According to the prepared text, the attack was really America’s fault, because of its bad behaviour elsewhere in the world. For insular Americans, the attack was a salutary illustration of what the Australian pundit Janet McCalman called their ‘lowly place in the affections of the poor and struggling’. Australia, unashamedly America’s ally, was effectively an oppressor too. If you took into account the behaviour of the Australian government when faced with the crisis engendered by the arrival, or non-arrival, of a Norwegian container ship full of Afghan refugees, Australia was even more guilty than America. Australia (perennially a racist country, as John Pilger’s historical researches had incontrovertibly proved) was a flagrant provocation to the wretched of the earth. Imperialist America was not only treating the helpless Middle East as its personal property, America had racist Australia for its lackey. No wonder al-Qa’ida was angry. On Christmas Eve, in the Melbourne Age, another pundit, Michael Leunig, called for a national prayer for Osama bin Laden on Christmas Day. ‘It’s a family day,’ Leunig explained, ‘and Osama’s our relative.’ It is not recorded whether the aforesaid Osama, sitting cross-legged beside his Christmas tree somewhere under Afghanistan, offered up a prayer for Michael. He might have done: after all, they were on a first-name basis.

  The prepared text kept on unrolling. Bob Ellis, with whom I was once at university in Sydney, is famous in Australia as an engagingly erratic commentator still carrying a torch for the old Australian Labor Party, the one that cared about the welfare of the workers until Bob Hawke re-educated it to care about the welfare of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer. Though Ellis’s torch is a jam-tin nailed to a broomstick and fuelled with household kerosene, he carries it with a certain shambolic panache. The Australian descriptive term ‘rat-bag’ is often used of him even by his friends, but nobody doubts that his heart is in the right place. Certainly he doesn’t. He was easily able to discredit President Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ by pointing out that terrorism is everywhere, and is especially prevalent in the allegedly civilized Western democracies. A letter from a creditor, explained Ellis, can be a terrorist act. (Considering what it must be like for a creditor trying to get Ellis’s attention, this might even be true.) A concept basic to the prepared text was that there could be no end to all this deplorable but understandable Islamist outrage until the Palestinian matter was settled: a settlement which was in America’s power to bring about just by picking up a telephone and instructing Sharon to back off. There was one conspicuous reason, however, why America would never do this: John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia. John Howard, sustained in his post by nothing except a majority of the Australian electorate, was a fascist in all but name. The mere presence of John Howard in Canberra, instead of in his local gaol, was overwhelming evidence of America’s global power to crush the hopes of the poor and struggling.

  Such was the consensus before the nightclub in Bali turned into a nightmare. Consensus might be too large a word. There are publications in Australia that dissent from the standard view: the magazine Quadrant is only one example, and so prominent a newspaper as the Sydney Morning Herald carries the opinion of several commentators who sing a different tune. Though they might enjoy promoting themselves as lone voices, the lone voices add up to a considerable choir. But they must get used to wearing a sticky label: Right Wing. The consensus considers itself to be left wing in the best sense. The appellation is one that an old stager like me is reluctant to grant, because the consequence of granting it, and then expressing dissent, is to be classified as conservative. In my own case, the main thing I want to conserve is the welfare of the common people: in that regard I am plodding in Bob Ellis’s zig-zag slipstream as he carries his ramshackle torch.

  But let us allow for the moment that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or at any rate they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.

  The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain. On Monday morning the Independent carried an editorial headed: ‘Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated’. Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was ‘the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians’. I count the editor of the Independent, Simon Kelner, as a friend, so the main reason I
hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.

  But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement. In furthering that end, the sufferings of the Palestinians are instrumental, and thus better exacerbated than diminished. To the extent that they are concerned with the matter at all, the terrorists epitomize the extremist pressure that had been so sadly effective in ensuring the continued efforts of the Arab states to persuade the Palestinians against accepting any settlement, no matter how good, that recognizes Israel’s right to exist. But one is free to doubt by now – forced to doubt by now – that Palestine is the main concern.